Green. There was no other way to describe the scent, except as green. And clean water, and a hint of something sweet. Flowers? And she heard birds singing, which she could never do in town. The air felt clean on her face, and despite the morning being cold, the sun felt warmer than it ever did on her own porch.

She straightened up a little, and took in lungfuls of the lovely clean air, and somehow, didn’t cough.

And a little spark of hope sprang to life inside her.

Mebbe this ain’t gonna be bad.

2

THE route they followed took several turnings, away from the Lake, across smaller cricks that she didn’t know the names for, but generally going more south than east, and through farm country. By this time, she’d managed to lose her sadness in something like excitement at all the things that were new to her. She’d never seen so much food growing before, and in her mind, she started to question Pa’s contempt for farmers even more. Of the people who were out there, there weren’t more than a couple out of dozens that were pulling a plow themselves. So mebbe the ones that were doing that were just bad farmers. It appeared to her that if you were farming, even if the harvest was poor, well, you didn’t owe nothin’, you just didn’t get much.

As for mining . . . well. Things had been better before Pa started coughing, but they had never been precisely good in her memory. The miners got paid by the weight of coal they brought out, and paid in Company scrip, which could only be used at the Company store—and how overpriced things were at the store was made evident by the difference between what Ma paid at the general store with the cash money she got from potions, and what she paid at the Company store in scrip. But the Company store did one thing the general store didn’t—it let you take things on account.

Which is why pert near ev’body allus runs a debt at the Company store . . .

She shook away these uncomfortable thoughts, and admired the green fields spread out around her, taking long breaths of air that somehow got deeper into her lungs than ever before. She hadn’t coughed once since they left Soddy! Most of the stuff out there in those farm fields she recognized; she knew corn and beans even at a distance, and squash was obvious from the rounds hanging on the vines. But other things were a mystery.

But all that corn! Even flint-corn was tasty when it was just milky, soft, and done as a roasted ear, and she longed to jump off the box and pick a couple of ears to have at lunch. But—that would be stealing, and that was breaking a Commandment. She couldn’t be tempted to do that, though the boys in Soddy boasted all the time out of the hearing of adults about how they’d sneak out after dark when they was supposed to be in bed and raid cornfields at night, and have themselves illicit corn feasts. A few ears of corn wasn’t worth the amount of praying for forgiveness you’d have to do, after a theft like that. At least, not as far as she was concerned.